


Local Idiot Mauled By Cougar

by fairgraves



Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 05:16:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15089810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairgraves/pseuds/fairgraves
Summary: One minute she’s squatting over the appropriately named mountain bladderfern in the middle of the woods in the Whitetail Mountains, and the next she’s staring down a cougar as it peers at her from about 5 meters away.





	Local Idiot Mauled By Cougar

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. This post is inspired by getting attacked by a cougar for like the fiftieth effing time in my last play through. It’s either a cougar or snake that always bites me. XD  
> 2\. Maya is my female deputy.  
> 3\. I’m sorry in advance if the verb tenses are a little weird…? I feel like I made some mistakes here.

Someday, if Maya survives, she thinks she’ll laugh about this. One minute she’s squatting over the appropriately named  _mountain bladderfern_  in the middle of the woods in the Whitetail Mountains, and the next she’s staring down a cougar as it peers at her from about 5 meters away. 

She yanked her pants up haphazardly and took off running out of pure instinct, abandoning her sniper rifle and her backpack in the commotion  _like a fool_. She raced and winded through the trees, branches smacking her in the face and tearing at her clothes and roots tripping her up. 

She’s not going to outrun a cougar, of that she’s positive, but she’s trying her damndest to delay the inevitable Hope County Cougar Attack. In the paper, if Hope County ever publishes another one, it will say: LOCAL IDIOT MAULED TO DEATH BY COUGAR… THE THIRTIETH THIS YEAR ALONE.

Just beyond her she sees a clearing with the sun shining through the trees and there’s absolutely no way she can steer away from it. The smart thing to do would be to take her chances and tire the cougar out by running around the trees, but she’ll be damned if she turns to avoid the clearing and would, by proxy, allow the cougar to take advantage of the lessening distance between them that a turn would require. 

She’s looking over her shoulder at the cougar a few meters back when she crashes through the clearing and runs full on into what she thinks, at first, is an errant tree. Only when she’s ricocheting into the grass does she realize that it’s not a tree that she’s hit. Not at all.

_It’s Jacob Seed._

There’s an audible  _oof_  when she hits him and he does stumble from the impact, but it’s the cougar, launching over the Deputy and square into his chest, that takes him down. He falls back, hands waving in the air ungracefully, his eyes wide with surprise, and then hits the ground  _hard_. The Deputy can’t believe her eyes OR her luck that this cougar has found a new target in Jacob, and if it kills him, well, that’s one less Herald she’ll have to defeat later on. While the cougar is preoccupied with its new target, she rolls onto her stomach carefully and pushes off the ground, hoping to slink away before the cougar realizes its original target is gone.

She’s not too far into the trees when she hears a deep-voiced cry ring out. Her heart sunk at the sound and she knows, stupidly, that she has to go back. She grabs her backpack and gun a few meters away and turns back. She’s not sure what outcome she fears the most - Jacob’s death or the cougar still being alive when she gets there - but she has to know for sure either way and at least this time she’s armed. “Don’t be dead, don’t be dead, don’t be dead…” she whispers, over and over, to no one but God and the trees around her.  

She shielded her eyes from the sun when she made it to the clearing once more, and sees the cougar dead with Jacob’s giant red-handled knife in its neck. And then her gaze falls on Jacob, chest slashed and laying in the matted grass. He’s covered in blood (some of it his own), but alive. She lets out a sigh of relief when she sees his chest rise and fall, but hopes to hell he didn’t hear her. 

When she reached him, she tapped her boot against his. “You still alive old man?” She tried to be light-hearted and nonchalant, but her voice broke a bit at the sight of him.

He surveyed her through heavy-lidded eyes and cracked a crooked grin. If it weren’t for all the blood, he’d probably look pleasant.  _Jesus, maybe even handsome_ , she thinks. “Take more than some cougar to kill me, Deputy. You come to gloat?”

Maya shook her head. “Nah - came back to help, if you need it. Since you’re bleeding, I’d say you do.”

She doesn’t wait for him to accept her assistance, knowing he’d probably refuse it if she let him. Instead, she sunk to her knees, straddled his thighs, and shrugged off her backpack. “Sit up,” she instructed him, pulling a needle, thread, and vodka out of the backpack.

He hoisted himself up into a seating position, grunting at the effort of it. Maya brushed her hands across his broad shoulders and peeled his jacket off, gingerly setting it off to the side. She hesitated only for a moment, but then grabbed the hem of his ratty t-shirt and lifted it over his head, before folding up the t-shirt to hold against his open wound to stem the bleeding. She’s doing her best to treat this like a simple medical procedure, but she feels the weight of his stare on her and purposefully avoids eye contact.

With one hand pressed against the t-shirt on his chest, she unscrewed the cap off the vodka bottle and unceremoniously took a swig. Lord knows she needed it now. Her adrenaline has crashed into a burning heap and the sight of Jacob half-naked in front of her is making her feel something she’d rather not. “Hold this,” she instructed him, grabbing his wrist and guiding his hand to hold the t-shirt. He said nothing, complying with her instruction. 

Maya splashed the needle with vodka, threaded it, and then made a silent prayer that he didn’t get an infection. Finally, when she knew she couldn’t avoid it any longer, she dragged her brown-eyed gaze up to his bright blue-eyed one, and asked, “You ready?” He nodded, and took one last swig of vodka to steel herself. “Okay, move the t-shirt.”

The gash was three straight lines, left to right, bloody but not gushing, and above his right nipple.  _Over his pectoral muscle_ , she corrected, nearly laughing out loud at the preposterous nature of this whole situation. Never,  _ever_ , did she assume she’d be this close to his half-naked body, let alone sewing pieces of his flesh closed on his chest. With shaky hands, she reached up and pierced his skin with the needle. He jumped dramatically, sucking air in to his lungs in a gasp. 

She jumped too and snapped her gaze, wide-eyed and confused, up to his again. He smiled, pleased with himself. “ _Asshole_ ,” she hisses. “I thought—.”

“Just relax, Deputy,” his voice deceptively sweet, “I’ll be fine.” With that, he closed his eyes, a smile still on his lips, and let her work in peace. The tension she had been feeling dissipated and as she gets to work, she glowered at his chest all the while. 

Jacob is mercifully quiet for a bit, and she noticed with bemusement that he almost seems peaceful - his eyes shut, his long ginger lashes sweeping his cheeks. And then, almost as if on cue, or as if he feels her watching him, he grumbles, “This weakness of yours is going to get you killed, Deputy.”

Maya rolled her eyes. “ _Of course_  you’d think kindness was a weakness.”

He winced, and not for the physical pain. What the Deputy hadn’t quite grasped yet was that a soldier who kills for him was convenient, but a soldier that would die for him was far better. The conditioning - the song - was used to trigger her kill response, and that much he had already told her. The praise he gave during her trials though, depending on the moment, her mood, whichever way the wind blew really, was something else a little more innocuous. Something that left her beholden to him in ways she hadn’t even guessed yet. She wasn’t fully conditioned yet and that was obvious; when given the chance to save him, she had run off, but promisingly, she had come back on her own volition.

“You think this is kindness?” He cracked his left eye open to survey her.

She sat back on his thighs and glared. “What makes you think this isn’t?”

He couldn’t answer her question without showing his hand, so he dropped it, and took to goading her instead, “If you had any sense you would have let me bleed out.”

She arched a brow and dropped her voice an octave. “Careful, Jacob. I might yet.”  _A warning_ , he recognized.

The two shared a look - heavy and full of contempt - before he chuckled again and closed his eyes and she got back to sewing his flesh closed. He purred, voice low and teasing, “There’s my girl.”


End file.
